0:04Skip to 0 minutes and 4 secondsANDRE MEIXNER: Yeah. My team consists of 15 usability and accessibility consultants and we are doing around about 300 to 350 tests a year. Our test process is a combination of two steps. The first step is an empirical analysis and the second testing or the second part is a checklist base test. In the first part, in the empirical analytics test, we are checking if all dialog masks of an application are compatible with the different assistive technologies. So for example, we are going through every dialog mask with a screen reader, for example, JAWS or NVDA, checking if there are any programmes detecting or reading out or navigating through the application. We are doing this also for software like ZoomText or LunarPlus.

1:04Skip to 1 minute and 4 secondsAnd then the second testing part and the checklist space testing part, we are matching every problem that we find in the practical test with the German law, for example, the BITV 2.0, or international standards like the WCHE here.

1:28Skip to 1 minute and 28 secondsANDRE MEIXNER: Yeah, sure. For a big company like the Deutsche Telekom, mobile applications and mobile work is getting more and more important. In terms of bringing your own device, nearly every employee is doing part of his or her work with a mobile device. And the good news is that the basic test process stays nearly the same. But the challenge is that we have many different devices. So there are many different tools in terms of accessibility and assistive technologies. They differ from device to device. For example, you have a different screen reader on the iPad or iPhone, for example, Voiceover, and other different tools on the Android devices or the new mobile devices.

2:23Skip to 2 minutes and 23 secondsBut we are doing these tests for several years and so for our team, it's no problem. And we can even provide detailed information, solution information to the developers depending which framework they are using-- which technology they are using. So for us, it's no problem but yeah, it's a big challenge for testing teams that are new to this topic. Yeah.

Involving users in testing

In this video Andre Meixner, Head of User Centred Test (Accessibility & Usability) at T-Systems Multimedia Solutions GmbH describes how his company carry out user testing on desktop computers with assistive technologies as well as mobile devices.

The good news is that there are many overlaps when testing on mobile and desktop platforms, but as Andre points out there are differences in the way the various devices, operating systems and browsers offer certain aspects of the various web based services now available.